The London Hammer: An Object Out of Time?

An old story regarding a hammer found encased within rock has recently resurfaced. It came to us in a question: is this hammer, the London Hammer, an example of an out of place artifact (OOPart) that calls into question geology, archeology, and the natural history of the Earth? Let’s take a look.

The article that was shared with me is fromEpoch Times, written by Tara MacIsaac. From the article:

A hammer was found in London, Texas, in 1934 encased in stone that had formed around it. The rock surrounding the hammer is said to be more than 100 million years old, suggesting the hammer was made well before humans who could have made such an object are thought to have existed.

If this were true, it would be quite interesting. In fairness to Epoch Times and Ms. MacIsaac, the article does do a decent job presenting some of the evidence. I’d ask for a bit more of a scientific inquiry tone to the piece, but there have been far worse examples of reporting than this one.

The London Hammer is well known to those who follow the debates and discussions around OOParts. You may recall that I blogged about OOParts last year. In that piece, I mentioned a good site to explore for bad archeology claims, named, of course, Bad Archaeology. They had a short write up on the London Hammer saying:

One of the major problems with this object is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the nodule was ever part of the Red Creek’s geology, which is the Lower Cretaceous Hensel Sand Formation. These deposits are thought to be roughly 110-115 million years old. Having acquired the object in the early 1980s, Baugh promoted it as a ‘pre-Noachian’ artefact (in other words, dating from a time before the mythical Flood of Noah). However, it was soon pointed out by a geologist that minerals dissolved from ancient strata can harden around a recent object, making it look impressive to someone unfamiliar with geological processes. In fact, the style of the hammer would lead us to recognise it as nineteenth-century in date and of definitely American provenance.

Carl Baugh is the current owner of the London Hammer. He is the director of the Creation Evidence Museum of Texas. The museum features the London Hammer (London Artifact, as they call it) as one of their displays of evidence for creation.

A good scientific discussion of the London Hammer comes from Glen Kuban on his Paluxy site. Give the piece a read, he does a good job breaking the claims down. He concludes:

As with all extraordinary claims, the burden of proof is on those making the claims, not on those questioning them. Despite some creationist assertions that the hammer is a dramatic pre-Flood relic, no clear evidence linking the hammer to any ancient formation has been presented. Moreover, the hammer’s artistic style and the condition of the handle suggest a historically recent age. It may well have been dropped by a local worker within the last few hundred years, after which dissolved sediment hardened into a concretion around it. Unless Baugh or others can provide rigorous evidence that the hammer was once naturally situated in a pre-Quaternary stratum, it remains merely a curiosity, not a reliable out-of-place artifact.

The stone concretion is real, and it looks impressive to someone unfamiliar with geological processes. How could a modern artifact be stuck in Ordovician rock? The answer is that the concretion itself is not Ordovician. Minerals in solution can harden around an intrusive object dropped in a crack or simply left on the ground if the source rock (in this case, reportedly Ordovician) is chemically soluble.

The confounding factor in all this, of course, is that Baugh will not release the artifact for independent testing. He has had it tested, it is claimed, but not in a transparent way.

The best conclusion I can draw from this is that the artifact probably isn’t an out of place artifact.

64 Responses to The London Hammer: An Object Out of Time?

It’s a common tendency for a committed believer to put forward any and every argument that might support some part of his/her position. This can lead to amusing contradictions. The supposed nearby rock is thought by geologists to be a bit over 100 million years old. This is presented as evidence that the hammer is pre-Noah. Yet believers in Noah insist that the world is less than ten thousand years old. Hence the geologist position is contrary to other parts of the creationist belief system.

The wood in the handle also contradicts the ancient origin of the hammer. Wood seldom lasts more than a few hundred years, unless it is well protected. There are very few examples of wood more than 2000 years old, and all of these were well protected, in very dry conditions. The assertion that a wooden handle that was left outside and unprotected, but survived with no visible change in character, through many thousands of years, including a worldwide flood, is silly. Sedimentary rock is usually formed formed over thousands of years, in the interaction of minerals and water. Water, microorganisms, and time will always destroy wood.

If the owners wanted to discover more about the origin of the hammer, which they obviously don’t, they could ignore the rock, and test the wood in the handle, and the steel in the hammer head. So far as I know, neither the Bible nor science assert that steel was produced in Texas at the time of Noah’s supposed existence.

Good grief. These people believe that the world is 5,000 years old. I thought the people making the OOP claim were going to claim evidence of aliens, or time travelers, not a pre-Noah clumsy worker who dropped a tool. This claim is bad evidence for their beliefs. If the hammer is really 100,000 years old, then the world can’t have been created 5,000 years ago. Human artifacts are often found of great age, stone hammers, axes, pottery, etc. Not to mention fossils of extinct animals and proto-humans. The creationists insist they were “planted” by God to confuse us. Maybe its Thor’s hammer and the pagans had it right all along. I hope Mr. Baugh did not pay too much for a worthless piece of junk.

Only a very small number of fundamentalists actually think or believe the Earth is only 6000 years old (inasmuch as there is no discussion of the Earth’s age anywhere in the Bible. The “6000-year-old-Earth” is not a widespread belief in Judeo-Christian religion, but the skeptical minority mock it as though it’s a widely-held belief.

Hello, I am one who doesn’t believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old. I am in Australia. Also many Australian Aborigines think they have been here for tens if not hundreds of thousand of years, not just six.

Polling data suggests that the number is in the high 30s to low 40s as a percentage of the population. I find that somewhat perplexing, to be honest. I run in a lot of different circles, some of them extremely religious, some of the drawing from the Bible Belt, and so on that I’d think would insulate me from biases in who I associate with that would keep me from running into such people, but even I don’t know anyone like that. A third of the population is a substantial number, even if you are someone that only rubs elbows with postdoctorates in less religious parts of the country. That’s like saying you are a Democrat that doesn’t know any Republicans or vice versa. There’s simply too many of them around for that to be realistic.

I think the point the Creationists are trying to make with the hammer is actually that the scientific methods of dating rocks as millions of years old (and thereby far older than their beliefs allow) must be flawed since here we have an example of an obviously recent artifact encased in rock that science tells us is millions of years old. It’s not that the hammer must be really old — it’s that the rock must b really young and, by extension, so must all other rocks on the planet.

Yeah, the logic is wonky and the big flaw in the argument is that nobody has actually tested the rock using modern scientific methods and claimed that it is, in fact, hundreds of millions of years old. But it’s slightly less wonky than claiming that the hammer somehow proves that tool-making humans lived hundreds of millions of years ago…

I agree with you. At least YE creationists I know would go that route. If rock can dissolve and reform in a few hundred years, but give readings of being 100 000 years old, it calls into question the dating methods. While still problematic and perhaps ignorant of all the facts, it’s a much sounder argument than the article contrives (that they think the hammer is extremely old). Don’t assume (all) YE creationists are dumb, crazy, or hasty – they’re people with the same IQ’s as anyone else.

Of course what is happening is people are thinking in a back to front manner. The mystery is not the hammer – it’s a nineteenth century hammer. The mystery is how the rock encasing it was formed in the 100 to 200 years since

Genealogists make the same error. Working back to front they create a non existent inverted pyramid that “leads to” and explains “Who do you think you are?”

It doesn’t – Inheritance does not work like that – The inverted pyramid leads over time to billions(sic) of “direct” lineages. Zionism especially falls into the inverted pyramid trap.

An interesting read, whether familiar with the London Hammer or not, I thought. Interesting comments from both side of the fence with one in particular that stands out. ‘The burden of proof lies with those making the claims, not with those questioning them’. Really? Sounds like a reasonable assertion. Okay then. Can someone point me to the scientific journal that has published the definitive study of the supposed ‘missing link’ which proves humans evolved from apes? I don’t for one minute question evolution as a scientific principle where appropriately applied and subjected to scientific rigour, but I don’t for one minute confuse a hypothesis for a fact either. I don’t have a ‘creationist’ bone in my body, or a religious one either for that matter, but I’m intelligent enough to know that those who hide behind someone else’s clever quotes (and yep there’s one smart arse quote for every smart arse occasion) and pretty prose, usually don’t have a clue which is their (smart) arse and which is their (smart) elbow. And to the first idiot who posts ‘Everyone KNOWS we’ve evolved from apes’ please feel free to post your scientific proof if you feel you’ve made the scientific discovery of the century. After all, apparently the onus of proof is on those making the claims, not those who question it. Oh and by the by? ‘Wood seldom lasts more than a few hundred years, unless it is well protected. There are very few examples of wood more than 2000 years old, and all of these were well protected, in very dry conditions.’ I think the word that follows that pile of uninformed BS is, politely put, uninformed BS. New Zealand native Kauri trees (Agathis australis) that fell thousands of years ago are known simply as Ancient Kauri. The trees have been buried and preserved underground in swamps for more than 45,000 years. Buried just below the surface of the ground and preserved in the water of peat swamps, the Ancient Kauri wood has neither petrified nor turned to coal. This underground resting place, sealed from the air, became a perfectly balanced cocoon that preserved the giant trees. Yep, NOT in dry conditions at all and NOT ‘just a few hundred years old’. In fact there are HUNDREDS of these trees just like there are hundreds of people who jump on sites like these and post what they purport to be (ahem) ‘facts’ to support their (ahem) ‘beliefs’. Science anyone?

OK, so first, yes: if you make a claim that contradicts the typical thinking about the working of the world, then you should provide evidence for that claim, otherwise we assume that the world works in the way that science has already described. That’s why the person making the claim has to provide evidence and not vice versa. It’s called the “Null Hypothesis.” If there’s no evidence for an extraordinary claim we assume there’s no extraordinary phenomenon.

Second, perhaps the author misspoke. Obviously things can be preserved in a variety of situations. E.g. the trees you cite in New Zealand, or the remains of Pict men surviving for hundreds of years in peat bogs in the UK. Presumably there’s a reason for that that’s understood to scientists. It’s maybe much more likely to find trees preserved in dry conditions, I don’t know. But in any case it’s still unusual for trees, bodies, and other organic matter to remain after death and decomposition. The hundreds of trees in a New Zealand swamp is still rare compared to the number of trees that naturally die and decompose all over the world. It’s just that the swamp provides good conditions for averting the decomposition process. Dry conditions can do the same. I suppose it’s obvious that those aren’t mutually exclusive and probably aren’t the only conditions in which such events occur. But it’s not exactly a counter argument.

For evidence regarding the evolution of man, I’d start with the scientific articles at the bottom of this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution. It’s a very thin slice of the available information. We have a lot of missing links and we don’t know how all the pieces fit together yet, but there’s an enormous array of evidence for human evolution (genetic, anatomical, fossil, etc). At this point the extraordinary claim would be that humans did not evolve from a common ancestor with apes, and there is no evidence for that. Therefore, the null hypothesis is that we did. And scientific evidence continues to be found for it. We’re never going to have a definitive family tree, only the best recent model. That’s just how science works.

Please feel free to make the scientific discovery of the century-fyi the discovery that humans are primates has already been made,over a hundred years ago. The fossil evidence,evidence of common descent etc is so strong there is no competing theory then as a bonus we have DNA as prof Collins said(a religious man and leader of the human genome project) even without the fossils and everything else the DNA on its own confirms evolution. I further maintain you are a creationist-of some sort as there no evidence of any other competing theory in biology

The real proof of human evolution is in the genes, not fossils. Finding ancient fossils is a hit or miss business. We have just a few individuals whose remains were preserved, at least in part. A skull here, a femur there, rarely a whole human from even 10,000 years ago let alone 100,00 or one million years. But humans and the anthropoid apes share genes, and the sharing is not random or a small sample. Apes and humans share over 90% of the same genes, a much higher percentage than we share with birds, or fish or even other mammals such as cows or horses. Because certain genes mutate at known rates, especially mitochondrial DNA (inherited through the female) and the Y chromosome, inherited through the male, the time of the separation can be determined fairly accurately. Ancient DNA is hard to come by, but some has been extracted from bodies 10,000 years old. But these are small samples and small number of samples makes for error. Living apes and humans, however exist in large numbers and the DNA evidence is clear: the two species are closely related. Much too close to be accidental, not close enough to be a recent development. The number of mutations required to make modern apes and modern humans from the same ancestor is around 1,000,000 years. Our oldest proto-human remains are about the same age. There is the evidence

Sorry, my understanding was that the wood of the hammer was heavily fossilized, which explaines its presumed ancient date. If someone says it is “just a couple of hundreds years old” this poses another problem, because who then was the maker? A native indian? A very early European explorer (17th century)? If it was dropped in the nineteenth century it would make sense from a historical point of view, but not geological, because it would constitute an immensiy fast proces of solidification, maybe not impossible but still highly unlikely. as far as I am concerned it remains a true mystery.

I should add that concerning the wood the correct description is “petrified”, not “fossilized”. The wood is, what I have read about it, not in a ‘woody’ condition. Maybe there exists a process of very fast petrification, I am no expert in this field, but my understanding is that it takes a pretty long time for wood to petrify.

The only alternative is that the petrification-story is simply not true, that the wood is just wood, but I am not in the position to check this.

Re “No one…not one single person anywhere…not you, not me, not Carl Baugh…no one has any idea where this thing came from” — have you (or others) asked the owner/s of it back in time re who collected it, when or where? That’s the usual thing to do, and without doing that nobody can say that nobody has any idea I think. Cheers, John

“have you (or others) asked the owner/s of it back in time re who collected it, when or where?”
Apparently that has been done.
They know where and when it was found and who found it.
That person is now deceased.

“That’s the usual thing to do, and without doing that nobody can say that nobody has any idea I think. Cheers, John”
The real question isn’t where it was found or when or by whom…the real question is HOW did it get encased in the rock the way it did…and unless some group can prove that one way or the other…re-read my first post. Cheers, Amboy

Thanks. I am looking for your post. Re how did it get encased in rock. I doubt that it is encased in rock. Iron in sediment, e.g. in a river, will slightly dissolve and form a concretion. This is commonplace… there are umpteen millions of such things that have nothing whatsoever to do with getting encased in local rock. But to know which is which one needs proper site details etc.

All good legitimate questions…I have no answers.
I did read somewhere that the wood had been test dated and it was SUPPOSEDLY many, many millions of years old…?
One does have to wonder how the wood could stay intact without rotting away, during he time it would take to have the concretion form…?

“A hammer was found in London, Texas, in 1934 encased in stone that had formed around it. The rock surrounding the hammer is said to be more than 100 million years old, suggesting the hammer was made well before humans who could have made such an object are thought to have existed.”

Your argument is null and void since you failed to use the initial facts to make it. I encourage you to read the article referenced in the post left by David B. David B. even provided a link.

Re “here we have an example of an obviously recent artifact encased in rock that science tells us is millions of years old” — the artefact may well be recent but where does science tell us that it is encased in rock that is millions of years old? Absolutely nowhere that I am aware of. Cheers, John

Some communists cemented a hammer and sickle into the sidewalk as a time capsule, and the sickle being thinner, rusted away, leaving just the hammer. When the old sidewalk was broken up, to be replaced, somebody found the rock encrusted hammer.

The handle has reportedly been tested and the reported results where that the handle was petrified yet coal, which both processes have never happened simultaneously so either the handle is very unique or the results bolstered. The fact that it is 96% iron and hasn’t rusted is interesting. Problem is people on both sides take hypothesis as fact. Another issue is that science with all its bits of random information has tried to piece together the history of the Earth and say definitively this is how it happened. How humans can ignorantly say what exactly happened millions of years ago without actually being there is just as laughable has any creationists point of view. We don’t even know what is on the bottom of the ocean nor have we physically been past the Moon but you can claim to know the workings of the universe, nor do we even understand the human body and all of its organs and parts definitively. Just my two cents. these artifacts while certainly interesting and fun to ponder in the mind will never be proven or unproven.

Scientific information, by its definition, isn’t “random.” It’s regular, reproducible, ordered. Science is a process for finding information, not a definitive story of how everything happened, and our understanding of things changes all the time as new information emerges. But obvious frauds or misunderstandings don’t change our understanding of history. You can invent a wildly weird hypothesis of how this hammer is ancient or whatever, but there isn’t much evidence for it and it’s incredibly unlikely compared to much more mundane explanations.

Just because we don’t know everything about everything doesn’t mean that anything goes and we should entertain all ideas about whatever.

Quote: “The stone concretion is real, and it looks impressive to someone unfamiliar with geological processes….”

Goodness, I feel so small in the company of such VAST intellect! Let’s continue:

“… How could a modern artifact be stuck in Ordovician rock? The answer is that the concretion itself is not Ordovician….”

Interesting. He can tell all that from pictures, lol. Tests, what tests!? This genius doesn’t need to “test” anything… He KNOWS people… HE KNOWS!!!, hahahaha. He continues…

“…Minerals in solution can harden around an intrusive object dropped in a crack or simply left on the ground if the source rock (in this case, reportedly Ordovician) is chemically soluble.”

Not to be a prick or anything… yeah right… haha… but how would you, he, or anyone else making this “claim” prove this point if no actual tests have been made? It clearly states (as if to prove your point) that the owner of the hammer would not allow tests to be made.

As Glen says: “As with all extraordinary claims, the burden of proof is on those making the claims, not on those questioning them.” Perhaps J.R. Cole should give that article a read? Might do him some good, know? I would say that it is rather “extraordinary” that you do not at least entertain the possibility that the original owner is telling the truth and that it just might be Ordovician. But NOOOO…. It doesn’t fit your pre-conceived ideas of the universe, or even our little spec called earth now does it. Pitiful really! You know there is a LOT more out there to be seen that does not reside inside your neat little square box!! You should get out of it more often…. no really, you should! Close your eyes, open your mind, and let wonder….

Interesting how logic can be used in reverse, yes? Also love how that arrogant punk says “mythical Flood of Noah”, as if there are not MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of examples, literature, etc. etc. that PROVES there was a world wide flood. Noah’s Flood? Maybe, maybe not. Hell, I wasn’t there and neither were you. Perhaps it was Gilgamesh or maybe some other unknown? I do not know, nor do I claim to know… unlike these “Know-it-alls”.

As for this hammer, … I don’t have a clue and neither do these so-called experts because neither of us have had the opportunity to perform any real scientific tests. At least I’m honest about it, unlike you and the atheist you love to quote like Mr. Cole and good ole’ Glen.

That’s an ignorant statement. Everyone that believes in Noah thinks the Earth is only 5000 years old? Seriously? No one in my church is ignorant enough to believe that.
Studies HAVE been done on this hammer also. Parts of the wood handle are turning to coal, which takes millions of years to do. Also, the metal hammerhead has no carbon signature. Steel mills today cannot produce steel without a small carbon footprint. Try explaining that!

How do you account for the coalification and incipient petrification of the handle?
Also, there was absolutely no carbon in the hammer head when tested by independent labs. Coalification takes millions of years, as does petrification.

Can you link to any of the independent examinations? I think you’d have to look at the actually studies and not just take the word of propagators of this story. Coal doesn’t typically form from wood. It comes out of prehistoric peat bogs, I’m pretty sure. It seems unlikely that there’s no carbon in the iron. Carbon is naturally found in a lot of stuff, including iron ore itself. Plus you usually shape iron tools using a lot of heat, generated by burning stuff that creates more carbon impurities. So that just doesn’t pass a smell test. This website gives a pretty good explanation: http://www.badarchaeology.com/out-of-place-artefacts/very-ancient-artefacts/the-london-artifact/

Note that A. the measured elements supposedly analyzed as part of the metal don’t add up to 100% and seem to be within the typical ranges for iron. Second: it notes that you can see there’s no “coalification” of the handle. It’s just wood.

Concretization doesn’t take millions of years. It can happen really quickly. I live in New York and the subways have weird calcification formations on the ceiling that usually take very long amounts of time in natural caves. But look, without free and open examination by a team of, say, archaeologists and geologists, the question is going to remain basically unsettled at best and totally unrealistic at worst.

Yes, peat turns into lignite, which turns into bituminous, which turns into anthracite.

You’d never, ever, find a thing that looks like wood in a coal seam, which sort of discounts the idea that the handle could be “turning” into coal. That skips a step in coal formation. Coal is more like a compost pile that dried out and was compressed. Before you can get peat, the wood would have stopped being wood.

By what method was the carbon content tested? (“absolutely no carbon in hammer”). Radiation maybe? X-ray’s ability to penetrate materials (complete thickness of the hammer in this case) is dependant on atomic numbers (iron 26, Lead 82) and intensity. Can there be a strength of x ray capable of the task of the hammer’s dimension? Can x rays even determine carbon in iron? Can Neutron beams? I don’t know. What was the methodology? Better ask that question! And why the space between the hammer and the rock? That doesn’t exactly fit the process of “imbedded” does it? And old bog wood handle, for instance, could be a preferrable choice by an historical blacksmith even for just aesthetic reasons, and would show a much greater age than a fresh handle of the time. Finally, there is no definitive proof of either the Creation Science Premis nor the Evolution Premise. They are both philosophies most assuredly, and they are both merely premise even now. Once they are referred to at the hypothesis level, evidence must be offered in support. Such evidence in this context is strictly historical, not observational, since we are not there to see what happened. So the rational, true science approach is to consider ALL evidence of course, not just natural evidence, which is the flawed, indeed corrupt, methodology held by the Evolution crowd. From there the process becomes the stacking up of the quality and quantity of ALL the evidence, and follow the where it all leads. To this point we have seen evolution/Darwinism easily and wantonly accepted by one philosophy, but then consistently running into trouble regarding their original tenants as revealed by the wonderfully enlightening powers of evolving, modern tools such as the electron microscope, information theory, and the new special 2nd law of thermodynamics. These sources are forcing them to come up with new, harder to imagine scenarios to keep Evolution alive. Meanwhile, investigators that include the Creation Science philosophy, by virtue of the same wonderful tools, are collecting an ever increasing evidential support of really good quality that is more elegant and easier to understand (Gange: Origins and Destiny; Stroble: The Case For Creation). Both sides still have to use terms like “it seems like”, “perhaps”, “one could believe”, “many think”, and “could have” with respect to their arrived at premise. CS though, has been progressively able to drop such uncertain adverbs replacing them with “it’s impossible” for some evolution tenets, and “this proves this is an extant mechanism” in supporting other, even biblical tenets. Take a look. Cheers!

I have carefully reviewed all the material on this topic and all the comments posted above and amazingly noted that the obvious conclusion has not been reached.

I have it on absolutely irrefutable proof that the “London Hammer” contains no carbon solely because it was forged in 2746! This highly sophisticate metallurgical process was only developed, apparently, in the late 24th. century. An absent minded time traveller, while conducting critical repairs to her vehicle was, according to her android mission companion, attacked and devoured by a raptor of unknown classification.

It has to be true. It was on YouTube. Mystery solved.

Cheers.

P.S. Not to worry, I understand that her android mission companion made it back….minus only an arm. Seems that raptors do not like the taste of synthetic skin. Who knew?

they say the hammer itself is void of carbon. And they said a portion of the handle was turning to coal. If this is true then this makes the hammer a million years old because nothing turns to coal in a few hundred years.

Interesting article. One significant issue in which there seems to be substantially different schools of thought concerns the age of the wooden handle. In this article, there is mention that the handle appears to be recently created; in other articles I’ve read, the handle is described as so old that it’s beginning to petrify (I’m not sure exactly how many years old that suggests it is).

Yes, people have claimed that the handle is turning into coal. However, the owner of the object hasn’t let it be analyzed by any independent researchers, and you can see in the photos that it looks like it’s just plain wood, which is not what coal or petrified wood looks like. And also: coal beds are formed from old swamps, not trees. Just because a bunch of websites repeat the same silly, sensationalist story doesn’t mean they’re anywhere near the truth.

I understand the skepticism. I read an article that stated the wooden handle was becoming coal? Look, I’m a unorthodox Christian but the interpretation that many so called Christians use from incorrectly translated bibles really paints us all as morons (I am a moron so I don’t need the help). I totally believe in science and intelligent design. I don’t see one without the other. Is this a real out of place artifact? We need the owner to submit it for real testing. If it is a true OPA, it will speak for itself thru testing. The owners reluctance to test it only creates more doubt. We believers aren’t all the same. Thanks for your time